Luke 1:46b-55
My spirit rejoices in God
1:46b "My soul magnifies the Lord,
1:47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
1:48 for God has looked with favor on the lowly state of God’s servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed,
1:49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is God’s name;
1:50 indeed, God’s mercy is for those who fear the Lord from generation to generation.
1:51 God has shown strength with God’s arm; the Lord has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
1:52 God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
1:53 God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
1:54 God has come to the aid of God’s child Israel, in remembrance of the divine mercy,
1:55 according to the promise God made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."
The Magnificat of Mary doesn’t need a lot of amplification from this retired preacher, but when it made its annual appearance in the lectionary for Advent, what first caught my attention was a word in the opening strain: “Magnifies.”
Lots of things go through my mind with this word, including how we kids used to commandeer my dad’s magnifying glass to focus the Sun’s rays on things to set them on fire on a bright Summer’s day (no, we were more scientists than sadists, so no ants were harmed in this memory). I also harken back to the three or four telescopes and the two microscopes I owned as a youth, which I used to magnify the inner world of protozoa or delve closer to the celestial worlds of the Sun, Moon, planets, and far away star clusters and nebula. Everything was about magnification, of some sort. As I was also an avid photographer with my own darkroom though most of those years, I can remember asking my parents for a “long tom” lens for my single lens reflex camera for Christmas, one year. Hoping they had gotten my appeal, I remember sneaking into the secret “Santa’s hiding place” in the back of my parent’s walk-in closet one day when they were out. Sure enough, there it was. I skillfully opened the box, removed the lens, coupled it to my camera, and tested it out, peering out the bedroom window, and being amazed at how “close up” it magnified things. Of course, I just as skillfully replace it just as I found it, and brushed up on looking surprised for the Christmas morning performance.
As any of you know who read my Facebook posts or labor through a few of these weekly sermons, in retirement, I have again picked up my love of studying and imaging the heavens. I first purchased a small Meade telescope, and started charting the heavens around our light-polluted neighborhood of Seven Fields. The little scope did magnify enough of the heavens to re-whet my appetite for MORE magnifying power, which I recently began to satiate though the purchase of a giant, vintage Celestron Schmidt/Cassegrain telescope with an 8” mirror. It was always my “dream scope,” and thanks to a young man selling one he inherited from his uncle, I got it for a song, and have been about the process of restoring it. Now all I need is for a warm, clear night to give it a go, but I’m guessing this won’t happen until next April? Oh well…
Most of the photos I’ve been posting on Facebook are from another cosmic purchase I made. A few years ago, I read about something called a “smart telescope” being offered by the Interstellar company. Once turned loose, the “smart scope” would be steered by an app on your phone or an iPad. The app would use the sophisticated electronics in the telescope to ascertain where it was, and what celestial objects could be viewed at that time of night. After selecting a galaxy, star cluster, or nebula from its learned list, the scope would automatically slew to the object, lock in on it, and using its computer and GPS signal, track it, endlessly. Meanwhile, its sensitive internal camera would begin taking images of the object every 10 seconds, for as long as the observer would let it. These electronic images would be registered and stacked one on top of the other, allowing this compact device to produce an eye-popping, bright image of something long ago in a galaxy far away—one that “naked eye” viewing through a conventional telescope could never see. This radical device was FAR out of my price range, unfortunately, but I remained intrigued by its concept. Fast forward a couple of years, and a Chinese company—ZWO—that was famous for sensors used in high-tech astrophotography set the amateur astronomy world ablaze by introducing their version of the smart telescope. Called the “SeeStar,” it had so many automated systems it was hard to count, was very compact, so one could take on walkabout, AND was in my retired price range! The thing even has built in filtering to cope with Cranberry area’s prodigious light pollution! I put my name on the waiting list to get one, and as they say, the rest is history. Check out my Facebook feed to rifle through the myriad photos I have posted. The image I used with last week’s sermon was taken by the SeeStar from the deck of our townhouse.
So, what does this science fair lesson have to do with the Magnificat of Mary? Back to that word, “Magnify.” My telescopes—smart or otherwise—don’t alter the majesty of God’s cosmic lightshow. They simply magnify it, so I and others can stand amazed. Even as the scriptures tell us that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” so do these “local” tools give us a closeup view of it by simply magnifying it. When Mary declares that her “soul magnifies the Lord,” she is not boasting one iota. In an act of personal and praiseworthy volition, Mary is focusing her soul on the reality of something wonderful God is about to do, shining its light for all the world to see. Her soul is “smart scoping” the glory of God that will be the birth of the Savior, Christ the Lord. In this simple phrase, Mary is confessing that she fully realizes that she will not be the key player in this unfolding salvific drama, but that her existence now will be slewed in on lifting up her Lord and the Lord’s Christ. Mary’s soul will act like one of those great telescopes perched on Mount Palomar, or like the Hubble, floating out in space, high above the pollution of this world that obfuscates the beauty and majesty of God’s redeeming act. But HER “magnification” is but the first act of a continuing drama.
Every believer who has been touched by Christ has an opportunity to make our own “soul image” of God’s heavenly glory and stack it with all the others produced by their Christian lives as well. Like how the SeeStar is able to stack its images of distant “glories” so as to magnify their light, their countenance, and their colors so we can see them here on earth, so the church and the “images” its people produce through witness, acts of mercy and kindness, and loving God and neighbor, are stacked up as a testimony to the world that has not yet seen the glory. One more interesting “technical” fact: If the smart telescope just piled its recorded images on top of each other, they wouldn’t properly “register,” one with the next, and a blurred, unrecognizable final image would result. This is due to the passage of time and the rotation of the earth, as the scope records its “every 10 second” images. SO, the smart telescope digitally “plate solves” them, using all of this data, and adjusts them so they stack perfectly, providing a crystal clear image of the object in question. In this metaphor of how we in the church magnify what God is up to by stacking our “images,” it is the role of the Holy Spirit to “plate solve” them, making sure that the final “picture” we produce doesn’t distort or blur how it translates God to the world. At least this is what we PRAY will happen!
As we read through the rest of this famous Lukan passage, we see that what God is up to is quite a tall order, and that all our souls are being called upon to magnify and transmit this glory parallels just what Mary is proclaiming for her own soul. Mary is doing what I do each time I peer at the heavens with my telescope or gaze upon the final image from the smart telescope of a piece of God’s handiwork. Believe me, I don’t do anything but WONDER at what I see. I never think, “Boy am I GREAT that I can make this equipment see this stuff,” or in any way can I take credit for the miracle that unfolds when the light of God’s glory hits my eye or is relayed to my screen from the SeeStar’s sensor. That Mary was chosen to “magnify the Lord” through birthing the Savior into the world did not give her grounds to boast on anything SHE was doing, but instead, she was to be the means to for all of us to see it. Her soul was the lens, even as our souls AND the church is to be our world’s “lens” to see what God is up to right now.
I will forever be amazed how most of the objects I view through my telescopes may not even exist anymore, but because they are so far away, their light may continue to arrive here on earth millions of years after they are gone. Robert Fulghum, the author of the popular book, Everything I Need to know, I learned in Kindergarten, would later write that he hopes that his life and its witness would be like these cosmic objects—that its “light” would continue to shine long after its “source” (him) was gone. May our witness for the majesty and glory of Christ our Lord likewise continue to shine after WE’RE gone! May we, like Mary and my telescopes, MAGNIFY the glory of God for all the world to see! Amen.
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